Sunday, March 1, 2015

The oft
repeated adage "A picture is worth
a thousand words" refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed
with just a single still image. This phrase is widely attributed to Frederick
R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in
advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", in
Printer's Ink, December 1921.

National Geographic
is the official magazine of the National
Geographic Society being published since 1888.
The magazine is known for its thick square-bound glossy format with a
yellow rectangular border and its extensive use of dramatic photographs. This famed magazine has published almost
1,500 covers; the first colour cover appeared
in 1959. The cover of National
Geographic magazine opens the door to adventure and broadens horizons. Every cover has a story behind the story. It
may be a tale of creative initiative, or of working in dicey circumstances, or
of the kind of luck that goes hand in hand with years of experience and wisdom.

Three
decades ago, a woman became an icon through such a photo – it was Sharbat Gula, a symbol of Pakistani hostility
towards refugees from Afghanistan. The current Afghan government is in a very
vulnerable situation both economically and politically. If roughly two millions
refugees are pushed back the Afghan government will have a major crisis on its
hands – things were not far different.
Years later, she was to reveal that she was very angry when the photo
was taken. The man was a stranger. She had never been
photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been
photographed since. The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was
soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent
he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him
he could take her picture. “I didn’t think the photograph of the girl would be
different from anything else I shot that day,” he recalls of that morning in
1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan’s refugees.

The
portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the
heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine.
Her eyes were sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can
read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National
Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years no one knew her name. In 2002,
a team from National Geographic
Television & Film’s EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the
girl with green eyes. He was shown some but did not agree to be her. Then came the news that the woman had
returned to Afghanistan years ago, and now lived in the mountains near Tora
Bora with her children. He met her again
– and it was revealed that her name was Sharbat Gula, a Pashtun, that most warlike of
Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they
are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. Time and hardship had erased her youth. Between the two meetings - 23 years of war,
1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: that was stated to be the story of Afghanistan
in the last quarter century.

She was a child
when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of
destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when
Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the
dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread. As
with many families, their family too left Afghanistan, moving through mountains
covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm. In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the
fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains
veiled by snow.

Now
30 years after her green eyes made that photograph one of the world's most famous
portraits, Afghan refugee's face is seen again… at the centre of Pakistani
corruption row ! ~
a recent picture of Gula, looking less striking, is washing around in a row
about corruption in Pakistan. She’s being investigated because Pakistani officials
discovered she was living in the country on fraudulent identity papers. This
week the picture from her computerised national identity card surfaced in
national media. It's an ID card that as an Afghan national, she's not allowed
to have. Pakistani officials say that
Gula applied for a Pakistani identity card in the northwestern city of Peshawar
in April 2014, using the name Sharbat Bibi. She
possesses computerised national identity card (CNIC), a vital document that she
should not have been able to acquire as a foreign national. That underlies the corruption that riddles
much of Government.

The officials state
that many Afghan refugees try to get Pakistani ID cards every day using fake
documents. They claim that around 23,000
cards of Afghan refugees were detected and blocked' in the 12 years since NADRA
was launched. In her official
registration with NADRA, Gula said she was born in January 1969 and gave
Peshawar as her place of birth. The photo attached to the application has the
same piercing green eyes and the same sculpted face seen in McCurry's famous
image only older, lined by age and surrounded by a black hijab covering her
hair completely.

Afghans
can buy property, open a bank account
and be confident they will be able to remain indefinitely in a country that
wants rid of its refugee population by having a CNIC, usually acquired with
fake documents and bribes. The problem of illegal immigrants haunts our
neighbour too, just as it bewilders us.